How Dayton eats: pretzels, steak, chocolate and a market by the tracks

Ask a Daytonian where to eat and the answer often comes with a story attached: a pretzel bakery more than a century old, a steakhouse that still won't take a credit card, chocolates from a house on Wayne Avenue. The city's food is less about one signature dish than about old habits kept going and new kitchens that take their cue from them. Here is how Dayton eats.

The traditions that shaped the table

Some of Dayton's food habits came over with immigrants and never left. Smales Pretzel Bakery traces its start to 1906, when Rudie Schaaf, who had come to Dayton from Germany as a boy, opened Gem City Pretzel on Warren Street. His daughter Emma moved the bakery to Xenia Avenue in 1926, and a fifth-generation pretzel twister, also named Emma Smales, runs it now with her husband, Joe. The recipe has stayed simple: flour, water, yeast and salt, twisted soft or baked hard, and made extra dark or extra salty on request. Smales pretzels long reached corner groceries around town, and Lawrence Smales supplied soft pretzels to local elementary schools. Today there is a Smales stand in the restored Dayton Arcade as well as the Xenia Avenue bakery.

Chocolate has its own Dayton lineage. Esther Price learned candy-making in a school home economics class in the 1920s and started making fudge at home; the house on Wayne Avenue later became her home, production kitchen and first shop. The company still sells from 1709 Wayne Avenue, and its after-dinner sweets turn up as an add-on in The Pine Club's online shop, one old Dayton name helping out another.

The Pine Club itself is a tradition with a menu. Jim Sullivan bought a Brown Street bar in 1947 and renamed it for the pine paneling he put on the walls; the bar has been left as it was since 1954. The kitchen cuts and ages its own steaks, the restaurant still takes no reservations or credit cards, and it lists coverage from the New York Times, the Food Network and Gourmet among its accolades.

Where the ingredients come from

The best place to meet the people growing Dayton's food is the 2nd Street Market, run by Five Rivers MetroParks in a block-long railroad building from 1911. It is open year-round on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and from the first Saturday in May through October growers set up outdoors on weekends too. Inside, more than 50 small vendors sell grass-fed beef, lamb and pork, microgreens and mushrooms, honey, maple syrup, sorghum and naturally leavened bread, alongside jams, chocolates, coffee and prepared foods for eating on the spot.

Local products also travel between kitchens. Smales serves its soft pretzels with a beer cheese made by Fifth Street Brewpub, the cooperatively owned brewpub in St. Anne's Hill that brews its own beer and cooks from scratch in a building that has been feeding the neighborhood since 1856.

The independent places locals point to

The Oregon District is a good place to see how Dayton eats now. On East Fifth Street, Lucky's Taproom & Eatery, open since 2011, keeps two flat-top grills so it can cook true vegan dishes alongside traditional ones, and makes its soups and desserts in house. Down the street, the Mendenhall family's Lily's pairs Southern dishes such as fried chicken, shrimp and grits and deviled eggs with tropical flavors and tiki cocktails, and runs a vegan special every Thursday.

Around the corner on Wayne Avenue, Wheat Penny Oven & Bar calls its pizza American-style and deliberately not wood-fired. The dough rests at least 48 hours before it goes into a hot deck oven, which gives a puffy, charred edge and a crisp bottom. On July 20, 2026, the same team opened Piccolo Orsetto a few doors down at 521 Wayne, a breakfast, brunch and lunch spot in the restored Dietz Block that also houses a cooking school and a cookbook library, according to WHIO and the Downtown Dayton Partnership.

Eating your way around

A Dayton food day could start with a soft pretzel on Xenia Avenue, take in the stalls at the 2nd Street Market, stop for a pint and a snack in St. Anne's Hill and end with a steak on Brown Street, a box of chocolates in hand. For a guided version downtown, the Downtown Dayton Partnership publishes self-guided Espresso & Treats and Brewery & Distillery walks on the Roamli app.

None of these places needs a ranking. They are simply where Dayton has been eating, some of them for more than a century, and where the next generation of cooks is learning the habit.